Overheard at Table 4: School of Fear by Gitty Daneshvari

Did you finish that book you were reading?

School of Fear?  Yeah, it was pretty good.

Just pretty good.

Well, it could have had a bit more editing.   There were some pacing problems.

Like what do you mean?

Like, personality traits that were introduced in the same paragraph in which they were used.   Like a dog who liked to slop up food right before that was necessary for a certain plot twist.   Little stuff like that, a bit of foreshadowing would have helped.

Preparation of the reader, you mean.

Yes.   And a character that was introduced late in the book.   Then never shown.   Strange stuff like that.  But other than that, it was a great idea.   A school where kids go to get rid of their phobias.   At first I thought it was going to be a slight bit of a horror novel, such as "scaring" them out of their fears, but it turns out that the premise was to force them out of their fears by a simulated test that caused them to pull together for a positive cause.   That was very nicely done.

Overall, then?

Overall - it would probably make a nice little movie.

Well, that seems to be the goal of literature these days.

You're right.   Books now seem to be plot outlines for scripts, rather than actual literary accomplishments.

Sad.

But true.

Booth 6: at the monthly meeting of the The BibliOphiliacs' Review of Books: The End of the Alphabet

It's such a sweet sad little book, the Jane's chord being "This story is unlikely" - and it is, because no love, no marriage, is like this marriage - but we all want it to be, and that's what keeps you going through the entire book, even though no dying is ever this beautiful - but these two characters are beautiful, and we want to be like them, we want to be like Ambrose and Zipper, the beginning and the end of the alphabet, and every man, at the end, wants to die in the love of a woman like Zipper. It's incredible! I finished it on the bus and nearly broke out into tears, there, in front of all the other commuters.

plus, the writing is eloquent and beautiful -sparse, yet full of meaning, and how eloquently balanced, the dance between the two characters, how each of them remembers differently their communal history. The book does touch on some realities of marriage, such as the things that we want to say but don't, the boredom with the stories that the other tells, the disagreements about when to be with friends and when to not. So there are bits of real relationships that are interspersed in there, which is probably why the book is so touching . . . it has the reality of marriage mixed in with the fantasy.